Stripe banned us for payment disputes but we never had a single dispute

(Stripe cofounder.)

Ugh, apologies. Something very clearly went wrong here and we’re already investigating.

Zooming out, a few broader comments:

* Unlike most services, Stripe can easily lose very large amounts of money on individual accounts, and thousands of people try to do so every day. We are de facto running a big bug bounty/incentive program for evading our fraudulent user detection systems.

* Errors like these happen, which we hate, and we take every single false rejection that we discover seriously, knowing that there’s another founder at the other end of the line. We try to make it easy to get in touch with the humans at Stripe, me included, to maximize the number that we discover and the speed with which we get to remedy them.

* When these mistaken rejections happen, it’s usually because the business (inadvertently) clusters strongly with behavior that fraudulent users tend to engage in. Seeking to cloak spending and using virtual cards to mask activity is a common fraudulent pattern. Of course, there are very legitimate reasons to want to do this too (as this case demonstrates).

* We actually have an ongoing project to reduce the occurrence of these mistaken rejections by 90% by the end of this year. I think we’ll succeed at it. (They’re already down 50% since earlier this year.)

> We actually have an ongoing project to reduce the occurrence of these mistaken rejections by 90% by the end of this year. I think we’ll succeed at it. (They’re already down 50% since earlier this year.)

More important than that is provide a way for people to get this revolved without having to make the front page of HN.

I know it’s not an ideal support mechanism, but I think this is one of the services HN provides to the community (informally). It can provide backdoor/informal channels through engineers and founders to some rather large companies. Especially when other avenues fail. But for the community, in this case, not only Stripe gets to learn about the issue, but we can all take something from this about automated systems and needs for manual overrides/reviews. This type of “case-study” can help many other companies avoid similar problems.

But we also get some of the back story from Stripe about why their systems are designed this way. What challenges they face that made these engineering choices make sense.

I’m sorry that this happened to the OP. But at least this channel of communication exists. And I think we can all benefit from it.